Every individual’s internet activities makes them contributors of data to an interlocking system in which they are forced to become in effect the managers of a personal hedge fund which tries to manage life risks placed on them by the privatization of risk. In this situation surveillance is just one aspect, and often not the…

Technology is transforming privacy–our personal control over data about us, our interactions with companies, and our relationship with our government. From Edward Snowden we are still learning the extent of the U.S. government’s exploitation of commercial services for massive and indiscriminate surveillance. While encryption and other privacy enhancing technologies can and have done more to stop…

In 2014, the Attorney General of India argued before the Supreme Court of India that there may be no legal right to privacy in India. In response, the Supreme Court decided to set up a Constitutional Bench clarify whether the right to privacy exists in India. This could mean several steps backwards for what is already a deeply…

We cannot understand the programs revealed by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers without understanding a broader set of historical development before and after 9/11. First, with the growing spread of computation into everyday transactions from the 1960s into the 1990s, corporations and governments collected exponentially more information about consumers and citizens. To contend with this…

While often misrepresented in popular culture as the practice of a deviant subculture, hacking has long contained small elements of protest, policy intervention, and political organization. In the past five years, these narrow engagements have swelled: politically-motivated hacking has dramatically proliferated. This talk considers the following questions: Why and how have hackers managed to preserve demographically…

The law in the United States has long approved of and relied on individual authorization, explicit or implicit, as a legal basis for agreement. In contrast, the European Union has sought to limit the unbridled use of consent and contract. Building on this tradition, it has demonstrated profound skepticism towards contract in its data protection…

It has been nearly three years since Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the massive scope of our government’s bulk surveillance of global telecommunications. The first document to be published from Snowden’s trove showed that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had ordered Verizon to turn over logs of all calls made to and from its customers….

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s latest work is an examination of Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, broadening the analytical horizon to include those who “keep on existing” and explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures….

Recorded visual media are the most prolific form of evidence in the legal system today, given the avalanche of images generated from an expanding array of sources: camera phones, laptop cameras, body-worn cameras, closed-circuit television systems, satellites, camera-mounted drones and manned aircraft. From investigations of petty street crime to major human rights violations, traces captured…

Since the earliest days of the Republic, political and military leaders have recognized that U.S. national security depends upon the collection of intelligence. The legislature and the courts have thus given the executive branch a wide berth to determine how best to obtain and use foreign intelligence. At times, the executive has so aggressively pursued…

This talk starts with an analysis of an article from a 1975 issue of Computers and People and ends at Gliese 581 in the constellation Libra, stopping on the way to consider the history of artificial intelligence tests and human-computer communication, obfuscation strategies, deep learning research, theories of the control society, and the Ashley Madison hack. The…